Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Benefit's Bathina All-Over Body Mist, with the cute tagline "Just Confess, You're Obsessed", was launched in Singapore in October. I thought it was about time I gave this little baby a review!

Benefit Cosmetics already has existing products called Bathina. There's a Bathina Body Oil Mist, and a Bathina Body Balm, so it looks like this is a new addition to the Bathina body line. Unlike the others though, there isn't any heaviness or oiliness in this Bathina Body Mist - if anything, it seems a bit more like a light, moisturizing fragrance than anything else!

Benefit Bathina All-Over Body Mist: "Just Confess, You're Obsessed"!

Isn't the bottle pretty, and the box just so adorable? One of the things I really love Benefit's bath and body products (and actually their entire line) is the cute, girly, flirty and quirky packaging. And, the products are usually pretty solid as well - in the course of my 5 years of beauty blogging, I've encountered their lipglosses, eyeshadows, blushes, primers, and foundations, and they've all been really good. So I had high hopes for Bathina Body Mist too!

Benefit Bathina All-Over Body Mist: The packaging is the pin-up girls beloved by the brand.

I know you're wondering about the fragrance in the product, so I'll just cut to the chase and start the review!

For this look, I used the following products below. I used the Snow White Precious Mineral BB Cream in shade No. 2 (the lighter of the two shades), the Belle Rose Cheek Blusher in #1 Pink Rose Shine, the Cinderella Fairy Glitter Shadow in #3 Evening Party, and the Belle Purple Rose Lips Lipstick. I've neatly assembled all the products below, so you can take a look at them! Because the collection didn't have an eyeliner, but I wanted to wear one, I ended up wearing my Etude House Play 101 Pencil in #50 (swatched and reviewed, and also FOTD'ed before, too), which is a deep neutral brown. I also used my Shu Uemura Hard Formula (previously called H9) Brow Pencil in Stone Gray (which I've been using even before I started blogging, but I've never reviewed - I'll need to do that sometime!).

I figured I couldn't go wrong with these products. Sure, the purple lipstick might look a little unconventional to some (although on me it's a bit more like a purply-berry shade, as seen in the previous swatch post), but I figured that it's hard to go wrong with a good colour of BB cream, a neutral deep brown eyeshadow (with glitter and sparkles, too!), and a pink blush, right? Turns out, this look was actually quite pretty, if I do say so myself!

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Etude House's Disney Princess Collection, Princess Happy Ending, recently launched in stores. If you've been following me on Instagram, you'll know how much I love this collection - I feel like the Disney Princess theme really fits in very well with Etude House's girly, innocent, princess-like aesthetic. So this is definitely bound to be a match made in heaven! I mean, just look at all that gorgeous boxes and packaging!

There are a lot of products in this range - three glitter eyeshadows, two blushes, two lipsticks, one mascara, four nail sets, and two BB creams. The colours in the collection are inspired by some of the Disney Princesses - there are colours after Jasmine, Belle, Cinderella, and Snow White. What you see above in the photo is the entire collection - which I will review in stages, but I thought, since I've been getting requests for swatches and reviews, I thought I'd do some swatches of the makeup items in one post first, so that the post will be just in time as you guys contemplate what to buy from the collection.

As usual, packaging is Etude House's strong point. I can't quite think of a brand that has packaging quite as girly and as cute as this, without venturing into girly-overdose territory. For the Etude House X Disney Princess Collection, the packaging has been made to look like story books - the nail sets. Everything except the eyeshadows and lipsticks have these super cute boxes. Just take a look below!

But I know that this is supposed to be a swatch post, not an ogling-over-the-packaging post (again, if you've been following me on Instagram, you'd have seen that already), so without further ado, here are some swatches of the makeup items in the Etude Disney Princess Collection!

Monday, October 13, 2014

Elizabeth Arden's Ceramide Boosting 5-Minute Facial is a two-step skincare product, that is supposed to give you glowing skin (like a facial) in just five minutes! This is a really interesting product, and one that is pretty interesting, too, owing to its two-step process. I was pretty excited to try it when it was first introduced in the first half of this year, but I just never got around to writing about this until now - well, good thing skincare is evergreen so better late than never, right?

The first step is a Ceramide Self-Foaming Mask, which you apply on your face and let it sit for five minutes while it foams and exfoliates your skin. I'm told that it also works as cleanser, so you don't even have to take your makeup off before use if you're lazy! You just apply it, leave it on for five minutes, and then rinse it off. The second step is a Ceramide Replenishing Serum, which you apply to your skin after you have rinsed off the Mask. The instructions tell you to leave the Mask on for 2-3 minutes, so including rinse-off time and serum-application time, the whole time you need for this facial is really just five minutes!

Elizabeth Arden Ceramide Boosting 5-Minute Facial: It really does only take 5 minutes from start to finish!

Now I know what you're thinking - will this work? How does it work? And how effective are these ingredients, anyway? In order to do that, let's start off with my favourite place in skincare products - the ingredients list!

Friday, October 10, 2014

MUFE's (Make Up For Ever) Artist Shadow range of eyeshadows is certainly impressive, as my previous swatches have shown. This time, I'm back with part 2 of the MUFE Artist Shadow swatches! And again, these shadows are smooth, very nicely pigmented, and have a wide, wide variety of colours. If you're an eyeshadow junkie, you can definitely go crazy over the shadows, and if you're not - then there are still at least a few shades that will catch your eye!

I mentioned that there are 5 finishes in the Artist Shadow range (Matte, Satin, Metallic, Iridescent, and Diamond), and you can tell which shade is which as it is denoted by the letter in the eyeshadow name - mattes start with M, satins start with S, metallics, start with ME, iridescents start with I, and diamonds start with D.

Because this bunch of swatches consists mostly of browns and pinksk (along with some reds and oranges), you'll notice that there are a ton of neutral shades. Almost every kind of brown (light, dark, cool, warm, shimmery, matte) is in there, which will certainly please neutral lovers, and there are a few choice taupe shades too! The pink and coral shades are also great as blushes - certainly a number of those look more blush-like than eyeshadow-like to me. But enough with my rambling. Without further ado, let's move on to the swatches!

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Make Up For Ever's (or MUFE's) Artist Shadow, its new eyeshadow line, has been causing quite a stir since it launched, and for a good reason, too. First, there's the sheer number of colours - 210 shades, in 5 finishes. And secondly, there's the quality - MUFE is known for the excellent quality of their products, and I honestly can't think of a single MUFE product I dislike - I've tried their eyeliners, lip liners, lipglosses, lipsticks, eyeshadows, powder foundations and cream blushes, and across the board, every one has consistently been of great quality. That's quite a rare feat in the beauty world, as I find most brands tend to have some products they're strong at, and some they're weaker at, but MUFE seems to be a great all-arounder.

The Artist Shadow Eyeshadows are also no exception - there are 5 finishes (Matte, Satin, Metallic, Iridescent, and Diamond), and all of them are smooth in texture and very nicely pigmented. I think across all the 100+ shadows I've swatched, only a few (like, maybe less than 5) shades had lighter pigmentation. So the consistency is great across the range, too.

Today, the first half of my MUFE Artist Shadow swatches are here! Yes, that's everything in that huge palette you see there! These are over 50 shades, and the shade names are prefixed by a letter that indicates their finish (M for Matte, S for Satin, ME for Metallic, I for Iridescent, and D for Diamond). I've included both their colour codes and colour names for easier ogling! The swatches are all swatched dry with my finger on my unprimed skin. Without further ado, let the swatches begin!